Nicholas Carr Predicted the Future | Deep Questions Podcast with Cal Newport

00:00:00.000 | All right, one more question. Matt says, "What do you think of the critique of

00:00:05.460 | hyperlinks expressed in the writings of Nicholas Carr?" Well, Matt, I think that

00:00:11.060 | critique quickly aged, it quickly aged, and the specific content of that critique

00:00:17.460 | is not that relevant, but the spirit of that critique is really relevant. So just

00:00:22.820 | briefly, I think Matt is talking about the book The Shallows by Nicholas Carr,

00:00:28.780 | which is now pretty old, it's from the first decade of the 2000s, and it was one

00:00:32.940 | of the first books to look at the impact of content consumption online on our

00:00:37.820 | ability to think deeply or think clearly, and back then the studies he was

00:00:41.740 | citing had to do with the impact of comprehension of reading websites that

00:00:46.620 | have hyperlinks because you read for a little bit and then you follow a

00:00:49.740 | hyperlink and you follow that hyperlink, as opposed to linearly consuming

00:00:53.100 | information as carefully structured and written by the author. Now, it's less

00:00:58.420 | relevant today because people don't read long articles with hyperlinks anymore,

00:01:02.460 | the technology went past that, that's an out-of-date technology, but things

00:01:05.980 | are even worse. So instead of now making it easy for you to escape from a

00:01:12.140 | carefully structured piece of long-form content, we just got rid of the carefully

00:01:15.140 | structured long-form content and we just read 250 characters for Twitter or

00:01:19.820 | captions on Instagram or we shortened that down to memes, let's just have a

00:01:25.300 | picture with a couple sentences on it, or videos that are incredibly

00:01:30.780 | tightly edited, boom boom boom boom boom, and so we got rid of the option of

00:01:35.740 | even not following rabbit holes by just making everything just quick rabbit

00:01:39.380 | holes. And I'm sure that is amplifying the issues Carr talked about, reducing

00:01:45.060 | attention, reducing the comfort when it does come time to read something like a

00:01:48.460 | book, reducing our comfort with doing that, our mind wanders, we can't sustain

00:01:52.060 | attention. So yes, the hyperlink critique quickly got aged, but the underlying

00:01:58.780 | spirit of the medium of internet communication pushing us towards a more

00:02:04.820 | fragmented mind, those issues have amplified to a point that I think even

00:02:08.700 | Carr wouldn't have predicted in his most pessimistic moments back when he was

00:02:11.820 | writing that book.

00:02:15.580 | (upbeat music)